Find Your Outside Voice Part 4 - Say It Messy
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How to Find Your Outside Voice is a miniseries leading up to my free workshop, Say What You Need to Say. This series is driven by my deep belief that when women learn how to speak up in ways that feel safe and doable, it can change everything. In this episode, we’re talking about the thing that really keeps people stuck: waiting to say it perfectly.
Register for Say What You Need to Say, a free one-hour workshop for women who are ready to finally ask for what they want and need in their relationships.
You have three options to join me LIVE: Thursday, April 9th at 5:00pm PT | Monday, April 13th at 12pm PT | Friday, April 17th at 9am PT
You’ll get three steps you can use this week to find your yes or no — and say it out loud.
This workshop is free. No catch.
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
Welcome to episode four of the mini podcast series, Find Your Outside Voice. I want to tell you about the thing that keeps women stuck longer than almost anything else that I talk about with them.
01:12
It's not even fear. It's not conflict avoidant. And it's not even a lot of the like heavy relationship stuff that we talk about. It's waiting to say it perfectly before saying anything at all. It's so simple and yet it just right from the very beginning, it stops women in their tracks.
01:33
And I see this a lot. A woman knows what she wants and she has done the work to know that. She knows whether she wants to say yes or she wants to say no, but then she waits. She waits because she doesn't have the exact right words.
01:49
She ruminates a lot. She's still workshopping that opening sentence. She tries to imagine how they will respond and then she tries to come up with a perfect way to respond to their response. And she's so caught up in figuring out how to say it in a way that will land perfectly and offend no one and get her the outcome that she wants, that days pass, weeks pass, and that hidden tax that we talked about just keeps accumulating.
02:25
The longer she waits for perfect, the heavier the whole thing gets. And then she starts saying things like, well, I should have spoken up. Now it's too late. Now I can't do it. And then that layer just makes everything feel so heavy and so stuck.
02:43
And here's what I want to offer you today. You have permission to say it messy. And here's what I mean by that. Of course, you're going to think about it and try to say it the best way you know how, but you don't have to wait for perfect.
02:58
Your voice can shake a little. You can use words that aren't exactly right. You can start a sentence and then switch to a different sentence. Messy and honest beats perfect and silent. Every time. There was a time in my marriage when I was carrying a conversation that I hadn't been able to have yet.
03:20
I had been holding on to it for years. I wanted to be closer to my husband, but I was very afraid of what would happen if I let him see that. I had been using my hyper independence and like not needing him to kind of put this buffer between us because it felt safer.
03:40
And I didn't want that anymore. So I tried to write out like the perfect way to say it. And then it didn't seem perfect. And so I would rewrite it. And it just, I just carried it for a long, long, long time.
03:56
When I finally said it, it did not come out beautifully eloquent. My voice broke. I was crying. There was snot running down my face. I forgot half of what I'd planned to say. And what came out was really just vulnerable and not the speech that I had been rehearsing.
04:15
I just said, I'm so afraid that if I let you see who I really am, you'll leave me. But that's what was true. And it's the very essence of what I needed to say. And here's what I learned. The other person doesn't need your words to be perfect.
04:34
They just need them to be real. Hey, have you ever had a moment where you really wanted to ask for something? You wanted to maybe set a limit or tell someone about the support you needed and you just couldn't make yourself say it.
04:52
Almost like the words got stuck. Me too. And actually, I lived that way for years. I felt alone and exhausted, and it's the whole reason that I do the work that I do now. If any part of that sounds familiar, have I got a workshop for you?
05:08
My next workshop is called Say What You Want to Say, and it is for you if you find that it is really easy to speak up for maybe your clients or your kids or your colleagues, but when it comes to your own personal life, you can't ask for what you want.
05:24
Or maybe you've noticed that you spend a lot of time, days, weeks, maybe even months, rehearsing what you want to say, but then the minute things get uncomfortable, you cave or you apologize or you retreat.
05:38
You're not the problem. You just never learned the skill. Say What You Want to Say is a free one hour workshop that's happening on April 9th at 5 p.m. Pacific. And here's what I can promise. You will leave with one skill and one thing you can actually do that week.
05:55
So you become the woman who can have any conversation she needs to have and handle whatever happens. Check the show notes for the registry link or you can also grab it from my Instagram bio and I'll see you there.
06:10
So think of one yes or no that you have been sitting on. Not the biggest one, not even the medium one. Think of something small, something that feels low risk, and something that maybe you've just been carrying around for a little bit.
06:24
And say this out loud to yourself right now. I want blank. Or I don't want blank. Let me give you an example. I have a friend who is invited me to drive an hour and a half to join her for an event that I don't really want to.
06:44
This is my example. I need to tell her no. I know I do, but I've been trying to think of the right way. I get stuck in this too. But when I take myself through this example, I want to tell her that it's not a good time for me to go.
07:00
Just telling the truth, right? I don't have to make it pretty. I just have to say what's true. That's it. That's the whole exercise. You just practiced your outside voice. The reason that I teach this before I teach anything else is that words matter actually less than you think.
07:17
What matters is that you let yourself say something that is true, even if you're only saying it to yourself first. So when I tell myself, I don't want to go to this event, I want to tell her it's not a good night to go.
07:31
That is me telling the truth to myself because I can't say my yes or my no to her until I have first said it to myself. So that's what I want you to practice. Just finish that sentence. I want or I don't want.
07:50
Just fill it in. That's it. In the workshop, say what you need to say. I'm going to walk you through exactly how to take that one honest sentence and then turn it into a real conversation. Not a perfect one, a real one.
08:06
So find that link. It's in the show notes. It's free. It's one hour. I'll see you next week for episode five, which is where I'm going to tell you what is going to try and stop you from doing this, because something will.
08:19
And I want you to be ready.
